In 1 City Block, Census Missed More Housing Than It Counted

January 25, 1991|By Constanza Montana and Blair Kamin. Tribune reporter John Kass in Washington contributed to this article.

The city block where Ebba Quesada, her husband, her son and her sister have lived for three years is just southwest of the Logan Square monument, in the Northwest Side Chicago neighborhood of the same name.

Bounded by Wrightwood, Kedzie and Sawyer Avenues and Altgeld Street, it is a block of apartment buildings, single-family homes and two-flats.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 33 housing units on the block. But a door-to-door canvass by a Tribune reporter found 163 units, the same number that city officials claimed were there.

``The census never came by here,`` Quesada said Thursday.

The block near Logan Square is one of 15 cited by Chicago officials as examples of errors by the bureau that resulted in what they contend is a huge undercount of the city`s population.

The Census Bureau announced Wednesday that the number of Chicagoans dropped during the past decade by 221,346. That meant that the city`s population was 2,783,726, the first time it was below 3 million since 1920.

It also meant that the city could expect to lose about $88 million a year in federal and state grants, or nearly $1 billion over the decade. It also faces the potential loss of political power in the state legislature and Congress.

In Washington, where he was attending a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Mayor Richard Daley said Thursday, ``There`s been an undercount along Lake Shore Drive and in the Hispanic community.``

Chicago, New York and other major cities are plaintiffs in a lawsuit to force the Census Bureau to statistically adjust the population totals to make up for an undercount of blacks and Hispanics. The bureau`s own studies have found a consistent 5 to 6 percent undercount of blacks in every decennial census since 1940.

In Chicago, Stanley Moore, the director of the Census Bureau`s three-state region that includes Illinois, continued his defense of his

statistics:

``This is the best census accomplished by our agency. There is no region of the country which conducted a more accurate census.``

It would be hard to convince Debra Watkins of that.

Watkins, who teachers at Malcolm X College, is another resident of the block near Logan Square.

She said she called the Census Bureau when she didn`t receive her census questionnaire in the mail and was told to wait for someone to contact her. That never happened, and it wasn`t until months later, when she called again, that she was counted.

``I encouraged all my students to fill out their census forms, and then I didn`t get one,`` she said.